A current contestant on The Bachelorette issued an apology after past tweets bashing Black women and the LGBTQ+ community resurfaced online.
“The last thing that I want to do is run from it,” Justin Glaze, 27, said, according to People. “I just want to speak from the heart, and hopefully, people will get an understanding of where I was then versus where I am now,” he continued.
The tweets in question reportedly included homophobic slurs and jokes about Black women that perpetuate colorism and were written and posted in 2009 and 2011 when Glaze was a teen.
In one of the tweets, Glaze wrote he couldn’t date someone “if she dark as @FlavorFlav” or someone who has a “body big enough to be an avatar.” In other posts, he also said that movies should have a “well spoken caucasian cashier, they need to have a rude black b**** as a cashier once.”
“When I look back at 14-year-old Justin, I was in high school and quite frankly I was the type of person who for whatever reason felt the need to fit in and say funny things and keep up with what my peers were doing and saying. The folks I had associated with would throw around really hurtful slurs that, at the time, I didn’t really think anything of,” the reality show contestant said on an episode of the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast with Becca Kufrin and Tayshia Adams.
The Bachelorette hopeful also noted that he doesn’t want anyone coming to his defense on the tweets because, “what I said was ignorant and hurtful then [and] it’s ignorant and hurtful now.”
Glaze’s apology comes after a string of incidents involving race within the franchise.
The first Black bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay recently called out the show for discrimination, calling some of the fans ‘Bachelor Klan.’
Past photos of Bachelor winner Rachael Kirkconnell attending a plantation-themed party in 2018 resurfaced prompting her to apologize, though longtime host Chris Harrison faced backlash for defending her. Harrison later stepped down.
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